mes had not failed to spy it out;
and here were the brown and comely ruins of their church
and convent to prove that priests had as fine an instinct
seven hundred years ago in ferreting out the choicest
nooks and corners in a land as priests have today.

A big hotel crowds the ruins a little, now, and drives
a brisk trade with summer tourists. We descended
into the gorge and had a supper which would have been
very satisfactory if the trout had not been boiled.
The Germans are pretty sure to boil a trout or anything
else if left to their own devices. This is an argument
of some value in support of the theory that they were
the original colonists of the wild islands of the coast
of Scotland. A schooner laden with oranges was wrecked
upon one of those islands a few years ago, and the gentle
savages rendered the captain such willing assistance
that he gave them as many oranges as they wanted.
Next day he asked them how they liked them. They shook
their heads and said:

"Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn't
things for a hungry man to hanker after."

We went down the glen after supper. It is beautiful--a
mixture of sylvan loveliness and craggy wildness.
A limpid torrent goes whistling down the glen, and toward
the foot of it winds through a narrow cleft between lofty
precipices and hurls itself over a succession of falls.
After one passes the last of these he has a backward
glimpse at the falls which is very pleasing--they rise
in a seven-stepped stairway of foamy and glittering cascades,
and make a picture which is as charming as it is unusual.

CHAPTER XXIII
[Nicodemus Dodge and the Skeleton]

We were satisfied that we could walk to Oppenau in
one day, now that we were in practice; so we set out
the next morning after breakfast determined to do it.
It was all the way downhill, and we had the loveliest
summer weather for it. So we set the pedometer and then
stretched away on an easy, regular stride, down through
the cloven forest, drawing in the fragrant breath
of the morning in deep refreshing draughts, and wishing
we might never have anything to do forever but walk
to Oppenau and keep on doing it and then doing it over again.

Now, the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie
in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.
The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by,
and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active;
the scenery and the woodsy smells are